New Pacifica plug in hybrid for $22,265 after federal tax credit.
 

https://www.davesmith.com/new/Chrysl...48a714fd2a.htm

They have 3 of these leftover 2018 models the other two are slightly more with a couple more options. I personally don't qualify for all of a $7500 credit or I would jump on this. I think a 36 month 10,000 mile year lease would work out to about $315/month but these have terrible residual and money factors.

If you have traditional IRA investments, you can convert them to Roth which will bump up your tax liability for that year. You can then apply the federal tax credit towards covering the tax on the Roth. Essentially you'll get your IRA money tax free (for the portion that you convert).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDPwQefY2KY

The hybrid system looks so much like the Prius one, that eCVT must've been licensed from Toyota...

So maybe the reliability won't be terrible?

I have a federal thrift savings plan that is like an IRA and has a Roth component but I am not allowed to move from one to another. I could try and add the max this year to the Roth but I still think that would only take me from a $2500 credit to a maybe $4500 credit and I don't have that much cash to max the Roth contribution so it would be a loan from the thrift savings plan which I am trying to save for real estate. Our old van is still really solid and does pretty well on mpg, this just looks so much better and is the same price as our van was new 8 years ago!

Well, Chrysler is miles away from phasing out their federal tax credit, so you might start planning to have a high tax year next year if you want to max that credit.

If I have just 1 more kid, I think a minivan will look pretty appealing.

I have a couple of friends that are harsh on transmissions because they treat the accelerator like an on/off switch even when steady state highway cruising (my working theory at least). One friend has gone through at least 5 transmissions that I know of.

When one of my friends asked for help finding a car, my assumption was that one of these eCVTs based on the Toyota design might be more robust than traditional transmissions. I helped them purchase a C-Max, which is based on the same design. We'll see how it holds up.

Ad said the prices were only good for customers living in Idaho, Washington and Alaska :confused:

I'm wondering if these have been licensed and used by the dealer for a short period of time. The $7400 "Dave Smith" discount makes me think so, they may have already taken the tax credit.

I was wrong about my tax credit, I subtracted my withholdings so it actually would be a $4000 credit as is now and possibly $6500 with a max Roth IRA contribution. I just wish the residual and money factor were more normal, that would be an under $200 lease, maybe almost $100/month.

Chrysler is actually getting close to the credit reducing as Google is buying these up. And do all the Fiat EVs count as well?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/jalopni...1826537718/amp

Dave Smith always has to use that disclaimer. They sell that price to anyone. There is $3500 in rebates and the rest is cutting them down to invoice where Dave Smith sells everything they sell. This the the place to buy a 2020 Corvette BTW as I bet they sell their initial base models close to $50,000 each. They are the biggest Doge dealer on the planet like 15 years running selling everything at invoice to customers nationwide. They are in a tiny town that has every spare field and lot filled with 1000s of GMs and Chrysler products.

It'll still be around all next year. An order from Google is only 30% of their limit. As it is, Chrysler doesn't even appear in the top 6 manufacturers for sales.

https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/Or...nuary-2019.jpg

The nice thing about the phase out is that even when the limit is reached, you have the remainder of the current quarter and all of the following quarter to purchase a vehicle and receive the full credit amount. Essentially there is a 3 to 6 month window of unlimited credits available after the phase out period is triggered.

That isn’t how Roth conversions work. If you are in a 20% tax bracket you would need to convert $25,000 from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA to pay an additional $5000 in federal taxes and max out the EV tax credit.

If you contributed $5000 to a Roth IRA instead of a Traditional you would only pay $1000 extra in taxes

If you take $5000 cash at put it in a Roth IRA there would be no effect on your taxes

*only examples, most households aren’t in that high of a federal tax bracket so you need to do the math based on your situation.

IF I was allowed to convert my traditional to a Roth (which I cannot in the federal system) I would probably do even more than $25,000. I see what you mean about not paying more taxes by adding other money to a Roth IRA. Maybe next year I'll switch the contributions over from standard to Roth as doing it this late this year wouldn't amount to much.
Doesn't the way this tax credit works just piss you off? If anything a blue collar middle class working family buying a fuel efficient minivan for everyday personal use should be the very group and type of vehicle a tax incentive is targeted at. Instead millionaires buying their probably 4th car or companies like Google getting 500 million of the money. So glad the money I do pay in taxes gets to help them out.

Yep, that's the criticism I've been making all along. This is a subsidy to help the wealthy purchase a new vehicle. The very definition of regressive.

Every manufacturer could potentially reduce the federal tax revenue by $1.5 billion assuming all 200k vehicles claim the full credit amount, and there's many manufacturers, most of them foreign and benefiting from this US funded subsidy. That doesn't account for the "unlimited" sales window that can last up to 6 months, or the following unlimited sales that are permitted during the phase out period.

The government has no business deciding which technologies and industries to "win" because that also puts other competing technologies at a competitive disadvantage. Who is to say that battery EV (BEV) is clearly the best way to reduce fuel consumption?

Any policy needs to directly address a stated problem, with very clear objectives, and be shown that the net benefit outweighs the net cost. If reducing CO2 emissions is the assumed goal of the tax credit (the goal doesn't seem to be stated anywhere that I can find), it would be way more effective to simply raise taxes on fossil fuels. Government should address problems at the highest level possible to avoid interfering with the free market, which is the most efficient way problems are solved.

I always thought this would have been better structured as "the first manufacturer to hit whatever unit limit, the subsidies go down for everyone," and then again, and again.

The way it's laid out now, the manufacturers that drug their feet with compliance cars will be rewarded by jumping in later when making EVs is cheaper and still get all the subsidies the first movers got. The other way, if the manufacturers wanted to sell the largest number of subsidized vehicles they could, they would have had to jump in as early as possible.

This is also ironically the way mining and drilling for fossil fuels works. Oil left in the ground becomes more and more valuable as time goes on. If there is a such thing as peak oil OPEC is killing themselves actually producing while the US and Canada just sit on huge reserves that electric cars or not will be tapped at some point.

EVs shouldn't be subsidized to begin with. It's a dumb idea. So dumb that if someone were to propose it as a new idea, the immediate reaction should be laughter.

That said, the least dumb way to implement the subsidy is to set a total limit of credits that all manufacturers share, and make the subsidy available at point of sale so lower income people can take advantage of it. This gives motivation for manufacturers to develop EVs immediately and in larger quantities.

I tend to believe you're right about fossil fuels increasing in value over time as supply of easily accessible oil dwindles. That said, there's always the risk of demand falling off causing prices to plummet. For instance, if a breakthrough in fusion energy were to happen that made electricity so cheap that fossil fuels couldn't compete, then demand would substantially drop.

In a way energy is a byproduct of petroleum refining. If you replaced the energy could you also replace the plastics, the rubbers, the asphalt, the jet fuel, etc. It's like rasing pigs but only eating the chops. Grandpa said use everything but the squeal. What saved the whales wasn't Greenpeace but Texas crude replacing all the whale oil produts.

Right, and "better" alternatives could potentially replace fossil fuels (as fuels). We'd still have need of the many organic compounds, pharmaceuticals, and dense energy applications for things like flying. But if we replaced nearly all fossil fuel consumption in electricity generation and ground transportation, that would drastically reduce demand and drastically increase supply. Only the cheapest/easiest/best sources of fossil fuels would then be profitable in this scenario.

I'm not even saying this is likely, just saying it's possible. My hunch is fossil fuels will trend upward in unit price with demand remaining strong through this century. I'm not confident enough to gamble on it though.

Fusion is just one possibility. There's plenty of others, with just incremental improvements such as 4th gen fission, or improvements in PV or other renewable energy possibly disrupting fossil fuel consumption.

There's an upper limit to price for using fossil fuels as fuels too. If fossil fuels cost more than alternatives, then demand for them will drop. I'm sure there's a graph somewhere showing predicted demand at each price point.

If you lease, doesn't the lease company get the tax credit and (hopefully) apply that to the cost of the car? I played around with the idea of getting a Bolt when they first came out and leasing seemed to be the better deal because I wouldn't qualify for the whole tax credit but would effectively get it by leasing.

I'm not sure about leasing, but when I bought my 2018 Volt I got it with 2400 miles on it at the dealership and it hadn't been titled. The dealer only used Volts as their courtesy cars and after three months or 3,000 miles they took them out of service, took the full 7,500 tax credit on them and put them up for sale. I ended up getting Ruby for over 12K less than the sticker price (along with zero percent financing) and all but 3 months of the full warranty.

I couldn't have afforded the Volt otherwise, and I couldn't have gotten the full 7,500 dollar tax credit if I bought it with zero miles, so it worked out well!

Nissan or Chevy who ever takes the Tax Credit on leasing. Cowmeat got a deal that anyone interested should look for. Looked at (WWW) at 2016 Volt under 30,000 miles for under 15000, but found out it was a Lemon Car, looked too goo to be true and maybe was. But dang I'd like to play with one.

If you lease the lease company gets the tax credit. Whether they pass that on to the customer is up for negotiation. When I leased my 2016 Spark EV the tax credit was not passed on. (At least they didn’t say it was but there were massive GM discounts applied so it could have been rolled in somehow)

I think they pass it on for the most part, IMO if you look at Nissan Leaf values, Nissan assued the "profit".

Chrysler was/is slow to pass on the whole credit, and the independent leasing companies don't have any of the other incentives available to Chrysler. I think in this case it's because they have an otherwise identical product for sale that doesn't get the $7500 credit and it would make it tough to lease say a Pacifica touring to someone when the Pacifica Hybrid is $100 less a month. Then they didn't have the hybrid inventory to support what may be a high demand. Instead they probably had trouble selling both models and needed up dumping 85,000 of the hybrids off to Google.

Automakers build to demand so they doesn’t have 85,000 vehicles sitting around that they need to dump at a discount. That Google deal represents 3 years of future Pacific Hybrid production and will be built to Google’s spec.

If there were a shortage of oil. . .

If auto pollution mattered . . .

If there was such a thing as global warming . . .

Then the simplicity of timing traffic lights nationwide would have finished first phase under Carter (begun under Nixon).

Then the simplicity of NEW roads not becoming parking lots would have been addressed thru design & zoning. Every single Interstate would bypass every single metro area without slowdown. Etc.

What matters is profit.

That all of your families were run out of the cities they’d built via ethnic cleansing ought to have been the first clue. Not so long ago a car WAS NOT a requirement.

So long as it remains one, the attempts to extort yet more of what little you earn (against the 50% pay cut for everyone since mid 1970s) has plenty of traction.

Electric cars or hybrids are only good on paper.

Nice discussion above. Would like to see Hersbird get what he finds best. So the advice on playing with paper promises to get a paper-only better car is pretty funny. Though I’m not laughing at you.

Of course the game is rigged.

To not go off-topic but only raise the question:

Where is the thread where contributors mark not something silly like MPG in an empty car,

. . but mark the percentage annual decrease in total miles driven? It’s only vehicle use in part.

As a forum, seems to me that’s the basis of integrity about being fuel conscious. And all that reduced use entails. (Electric-only cars are pretty much worse; no get out of jail free card are they).



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